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It has been estimated that 70% of Continuous Improvement efforts such as Lean, Six Sigma, Agile Manufacturing and others fail to meet expectations. This happens for two primary reasons: 1) The Factory’s Operating Systems lack sufficient structure and are not conducive for Continuous Improvement. The Operating System is the array of policies, processes, people, and technology that are used to execute operations. 2) CI requires a high degree of Operational Discipline that, in the absence of a well-structured Operating System, is nearly impossible to cultivate. Through an in-depth assessment, a set of conditions have emerged that hinder progress toward creating a culture of Continuous Improvement. These conditions are the result of human nature in the manufacturing environment and thus require an Operating System that provides the controls necessary for performance breakthroughs. Some of these conditions include:

Competing interests and misaligned agendas

Issues that could have easily been resolved evolving into expensive problems

Uncertainty about how much time systems are down and why

Lack of issue resolution and insufficient accountability systems

Changes leading to expensive problems caused by a lack of preparedness

Implementations that don’t sufficiently capture the opportunity

…and many more!

Download the whitepaper titled Why Most American Continuous Improvement Initiatives Fail from Excelville.com to get the full list of conditions including descriptions that create and perpetuate a lack of operational discipline. Also discover what manufacturing leaders can do to cultivate discipline and lay the foundation for successful CI implementations. Visit the Manuficient Consulting website at manuficient.com or subscribe to my blog at calvinlwilliams.com for more information on this topic. Feel free to share this link with colleagues, friends, or anyone else interested in understanding how to improve factory performance.